Like a couple of horny teenagers. He smiled at the thought.
On his way down the stairs, he remembered the nightmare, and his smile
slipped away.
The blonde. The knife. The eye.
It had seemed so real.
At the foot of the stairs he stopped, listening. The silence in the
house was unnatural. He rapped one knuckle against the newel post, just
to hear a sound. The tap seemed softer than it should have been.
The silence following it was deeper than before.
“Jesus, that dream really spooked you,” he said aloud, and the sound of
his own voice was reassuring.
His bare feet made an amusing slapping sound on the oak floor of the
downstairs hall, and even more noise on the tile floor of the kitchen.
His thirst growing more acute by the second, he took a can of Pepsi from
the refrigerator, popped it open, tilted his head back, closed his eyes,
and had a long drink.
It didn’t taste like cola. It tasted like beer.
Frowning, he opened his eyes and looked at the can. It was not a can
any more. It was a bottle of beer, the same brand as in the dream:
Corona.
Neither he nor Lindsey drank Corona. When they had a beer, which was
rarely, it was a Heineken.
Fear went through him like vibrations through a wire.
Then he noticed that the tile floor of the kitchen was gone. He was
standing barefoot on gravel. The stones cut into the balls of his feet.
As his heart began to race, he looked around the kitchen with a
desperate need to reaffirm that he was in his own house, that the world
had not just tilted into some bizarre new dimension. He let his gaze
travel over the familiar white-washed birch cabinets, the dark granite
countertops, the dishwasher, the gleaming face of the built-in
microwave, and he willed the nightmare to recede. But the gravel floor
remained. He was still holding a Corona in his right hand. He turned
toward the sink, intent on splashing cold water in his face, but the
sink was no longer there. One half of the kitchen had vanished,
replaced by a roadside bar along which cars were parked in a row, and
then-he was not in his kitchen at all. It was entirely gone. He was in
the open air of the April night, where thick fog glowed with the
reflection of red neon from a sign somewhere behind him. He was walking
along a graveled parking lot, past the row of parked cars. He was not
barefoot any more but wearing rubber-soled black Rockports.
He heard a woman say, “My name’s Lisa. What’s yours?”
He turned his head and saw the blonde. She was at his side, keeping
pace with him across the parking lot.
Instead of answering her right away, he tipped the Corona to his mouth,
sucked down the last couple of ounces, and dropped the empty bottle on
the gravel. “My name-” he gasped as cold Pepsi foamed from the dropped
can, and puddled around his bare feet. The gravel had disappeared. A
spreading pool of cola glistened on the peach-colored Santa Fe tiles of
his kitchen floor.
In Redlow’s Pontiac, Lisa told Vassago to take the San Diego Freeway
south. By the time he traveled eastward on fog-filled surface streets
and eventually found a freeway entrance, she had extracted capsules of
what she said was PCP from the pharmacopoeia in her purse, and they had
washed them down with the rest of her beer.
PCP was an animal tranquilizer that often had the opposite of a
tranquilizing effect on human beings, exciting them into destructive
frenzies.
It would be interesting to watch the impact of the drug on Lisa, who
seemed to have the conscience of a snake, to whom the concept of
morality was utterly alien, who viewed the world with unrelenting hatred
and contempt, whose sense of personal power and superiority did not
preclude a self-destructive streak, and who was already so full of
tightly contained psychotic energy that she always seemed about to
explode. He suspected that, with the aid of PCP, she’d be capable of
highly entertaining extremes of violence, fierce storms of bloody